Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Pedophiles and a Restrained Media

Posted: May 6, 2013 in Uncategorized
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Over the past two weeks, it’s been discovered that two separate foreign pedophiles – a Brit in Beijing and an American in Nanjing – were working in Chinese schools with children. I’ve been waiting to comment on this story to see how it panned out and whether it would blow up in the Chinese press.

Surprisingly, it hasn’t. Weibo was only returning a few hundred results for “Neil Robinson” (the British pedophile). A few Chinese

Wesley Lowe and Neil Robinson

Wesley Lowe and Neil Robinson

outlets reported it – mostly using Xinhua copy – and TV reports appeared to stay very brief, sticking just to the facts and forgoing much commentary.

Compare that to about a year ago when a British man appeared on video to be sexually assaulting a woman in Beijing and, in a separate incident, a Russian cellist had the audacity to put his feet up on the seat in front of him on the train. These two incidents caused a media/Weibo uproar and were the talk of China for a few weeks. Many believe they even precipitated a 100-day crackdown on illegal foreigners in Beijing that followed soon after.

So why did these two events call people to arms and create a xenophobic shitstorm, yet people don’t seem especially bothered now by two cases of verifiable foreign sexual predators infiltrating Chinese schools?

I wondered the same thing back in October when there was another cluster of bad laowai that, on the surface, seemed to be much worse than those that had preceded the 100-day crackdown. There was a drunk Russian who rampaged through Beijing, an American who allegedly raped a 16-year-old Chinese girl in Shenzhen, and a Frenchman who attacked random people in Guilin. Again, very little uproar compared to the British rapist and Russian cellist. Why?

I’m not big on conspiracy theories, but as Apple can now tell you, highly-coordinated media/internet campaigns aimed at riling up anger at a foreign target can, and most certainly do, happen in China.

Anyone in the media can tell you that how much play a certain story receives depends on a lot of factors, many of which are totally random (who happens to see and retweet it, what else is happening in the news, what angle the story is initialy covered from, etc.). So it is possible that, for whatever reason, these pedophiles and the bad laowai cluster in October simply failed to reach that critical mass needed to get wide coverage – a critical mass that the British rapist/Russian cellist somehow managed to attain.

But consider what was going on in the news just prior to when the British rapist video went viral in early May last year. The fallout over Chen Guangcheng’s escape was still going on, and that had come right on the heels of Bo Xilai’s sensational purging – both events that shook the Communist Party hard. There was a lot of talk about how these incidents might disrupt the upcoming power handover. It was a period where a bit of outwardly-directed nationalism would be very convenient.

When the British rapist video came out, it was heavily promoted on major video sharing sites. Then when the Russian cellist video was released, the two events were held up together across many different outlets with an “arrogant laowai” angle. Beijing Morning Post even seemed to believe the Russian cellist warranted front page coverage.

Maybe media were directed to sensationalize these things, or more likely, they were simply allowed to pounce on a topic guaranteed to generate good ratings. I’ve written before on how we probably have censorship to thank for media xenophobia not being as bad as it could be in China. To make a contrast, South Korea last year gave us the much derided “exposé” entitled “The Shocking Reality About Relationships With Foreigners.” Then back in 2007, when a single foreign pedophile was discovered to have taught in Korea, there was a media uproar and soon after the country tightened its visa policy.

In China we now have not one, but TWO foreign pedophiles. That constitutes an epidemic in any country’s media, but the fact that the Chinese press has shown so much restraint and not played the foreign menace card in this case suggests to me that it wasn’t necessarily their choice. Xenophobia is useful for the government in small periodic doses, but it definitely has its negative consequences and can easily get out of hand. At this point in time, there doesn’t seem much to be gained from such an uproar.

In many ways though, I’m disappointed these pedophile stories haven’t received more attention.  Foreign sex offenders coming to teach in China are actually a significant problem. And that problem is just the tip of the iceberg of a much greater social epidemic the whole of China faces.

I actually personally knew the Nanjing pedophile involved in the current case when I taught with him a few years ago (I wrote about him here in 2011). When a co-worker discovered he was a sex offender and informed the coordinator of the school, she did nothing for over a week. Only when the co-worker threatened to call the police did she reluctantly fire the man.

The co-worker still ended up tipping off police, who it now appears did absolutely nothing (this was in late 2009 and the pedophile has apparently still been in China the past 3 years).

It may be a bit hasty though to totally blame these authority figures for their reluctance to take action. The concept of pedophilia is largely unknown and willfully ignored in Chinese education, and this has tragic consequences. But the kids I worry about most aren’t the ones in private international schools. They’re the ones in rural Chinese public schools.

Every few years a huge scandal surfaces involving a Chinese teacher sexually abusing his students. In 2005, a teacher raped 26 fourth and fifth graders. In 2009, a Hunan teacher raped 11 students aged 9 to 14. Then just last year, a government official who also taught at a vocational college was arrested after he raped as many as 100 girls – some as young as 11.  You rarely hear about pedophiles in China until they’ve racked up a lot of victims, and that’s pretty telling.

China has the same social stigma attached to sexual abuse that many countries do, which prevents victims and their parents from coming forward. On top of that, China has almost no sexual abuse education for kids or parents, so the concept and frequency of pedophilia isn’t very well understood by the public. It’s totally feasible that even when it’s reported to some kind of school administrator or authority figure, they’re genuinely unsure of what to do. On top of that, in rural areas, many parents leave their kids behind with grandparents while they go out for migrant work, making it even harder to deal with sexual abuse incidents.

But there are also some much more sinister dynamics in play.

The last thing you want to do if you’re a Chinese parent is risk upsetting people who have power over your child’s education. That alone keeps many from pressing the issue. If you do go to the school administration their first inclination is to put a lid on the incident (this is usually what’s found to have happened in the aftermath of these scandals). They’ll pressure you to stay quiet and say they’ll move your child to another teacher or transfer the teacher to another school. Then some hush money seals the deal.

If you’re in a rural area and you go straight to the police, ultimately they’re accountable to the town Party secretary, who may be on cozy terms with the school administration. The last thing he wants is a disruption to “social harmony” or negative attention brought to his town. You’ll probably get the same carrots and sticks there: hush money and pressure to stay quiet, coupled with the implication that your case really has no legal standing anyways. Only if you figure out that other kids have been abused by the same person and you band together with their parents are you likely to ever make the case see the light of day.

These foreign pedophiles probably should have been pounced on harder by the media; not from an angle emphasizing their foreignness, but emphasizing the child abuse epidemic and the conditions that attract creeps like these to China. There are some now calling for mandatory background checks on foreign teachers in China. That’s probably a good start, but that’s just scratching the surface of all that needs to be changed.

Desensitized in China

Posted: November 21, 2012 in Uncategorized
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A few years ago while living in China I went back home to Kansas City for a short trip. One day I was riding in a car with my mother and we passed a child about five years old sitting alone on the sidewalk.

My mom asked if I’d “seen that”. I had, but it didn’t register what she was referring to.

“See what?” I asked.

“That little boy,” she replied. “He was all alone there without his parents.”

“Oh yeah,” I said dismissively.

“We’d better go back and make sure he’s ok,” she said as she pulled onto the next street to turn around.

“K…” I answered, just starting to realize what the big deal was.

By the time we got to the boy, another woman had also pulled over to see what was up. We all walked around with the child looking for his parents until eventually we called the police. An officer showed up within ten minutes and took the boy to the station.

As soon as I saw that the other woman had pulled over, it immediately sank in what I’d just done…or rather, what I’d failed to do, and it made me sick. Had I been alone in the car, I would have kept on driving. I was ashamed because it’s not something I would have done just a few years earlier. China had desensitized me.

Last week five young Guizhou children were found dead in a dumpster from carbon monoxide poisoning after they’d climbed in and burned coal to stay warm. They’d been missing for three weeks after running away from home. Someone apparently even took a picture of them sitting in a public place the day before their deaths, but still, no social safety net caught them in time.

The five children (maybe) via Sina Weibo user @公民李元龙, via Beijing Cream

I wasn’t the least bit surprised. People wrote heartfelt messages of sorrow and disgust online, but I imagine if they’d walked by the kids sitting alone on the street themselves, most would have just kept walking by. It pains me now to say it, but I’ve done it dozens of times myself.

It’s not that people in China are heartless. The sight of children running around alone is just so depressingly common that it’s barely enough to raise an eyebrow. Sometimes they’re child beggars being exploited by a guardian watching from around the corner. Sometimes they’ve just been left to run about by parents who’ve never been warned by the always-harmonious media about China’s epidemic of child kidnappers.

These unaccompanied children are ubiquitous and there’s been very little done to educate society that this isn’t a normal or acceptable thing. Unfortunately, when I entered this society I gradually forgot this myself.

People have been quick to blame the parents, the school principals and local government officials for letting these kids slip through their fingers. Indeed, they all bear some responsibility, but so do all of us who’ve ever seen a child alone and kept walking. Most of all though, responsibility lies with the system that’s allowed us to become desensitized to something that’s clearly very disturbing.

Foreigners Who Ruin it for the Rest of Us – The Sexual Predators

Posted: December 12, 2011 in Uncategorized
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After last week’s “Microcosms” I decided I like the idea of doing a mini-series of articles, so I’m starting another irregular one I’ll add to from time to time portraying “foreigners who ruin it for the rest of us.”

For a brief period of my life I’d rather forget about, I worked at a private English academy in Nanjing. These places have a (frequently deserved) reputation for milking every dime they can out of students and teachers alike, putting profit ahead of any sense of ethics or honesty. These places are also notorious for taking nothing but skin color into consideration when hiring foreign teachers. So naturally, some interesting characters end up there.

When I started, there was another teacher who was single, in his 50’s and so obese that he had trouble walking. He insisted on being called Dr. Lowe (because apparently a Ph.D in trumpet entitles you to that prefix). Of course I wondered what the hell he was doing teaching English in China. He clearly didn’t come to enjoy the scenery. But I didn’t think too much of it. I’ve grown accustomed to seeing people in China with that exact description and have learned not to pass judgment. A lot of them have just struck out with women or careers back home, but there are actually a fair amount that genuinely have a (non-sexual) interest in China.

However, another teacher who had been working with the man for several months sensed something was up by the way he interacted with some of the younger students. He ran a search on the US national sex offender registry and sure enough:

In retrospect I'm not sure how I ever missed it.

The good doctor had been convicted in three states of sex crimes against minors and child pornography. The teacher who discovered this immediately alerted the boss – who quickly sprang into action. And by that I mean she did nothing for over a week until that teacher threatened to inform the police.

When I first came to China a foreign friend told me a saying that floats around in the expat community: “Foreigners who move to China are either looking for something or running away from something.” I think we can safely assume Dr. Lowe was doing both.  He taught kids as young as seven at the school, and even worse, tutored several children unsupervised in his home – which explicitly violates parole rules for sex offenders.

Places like China and Southeast Asia are very enticing for people like this. They can easily get teaching jobs with no questions asked and escape the stigma of their home countries where they’re publically announced as sex offenders. But most disturbing, China offers a much safer venue to commit their crimes. In most cases, if a child is abused, their family doesn’t dare tell anyone about it. The stigma of sexual abuse leads many to see the kids as “damaged goods.” And even if the family does want to go public with an incident, hush agreements with cash payment are often made to keep families and media quiet.

Besides the obvious heinousness of the crimes themselves, what bothers me is that in the eyes of most Chinese a foreigner is a walking embodiment of his country, or of “foreigners” in general. I take my coat off, and it’s “Ah, I think Americans must like the cold,” according to a former student.

So when there’s a disproportionate number of these creeps coming into the country, they strongly reinforce the idea that we westerners are all depraved sexual deviants. I think it’s only a matter of time before the Chinese media latches onto a case like Dr. Lowe’s and creates a nationalistic shit storm like what happened in South Korea in 2007.

And what’s the solution? Private schools can’t be trusted to weed out these people and miss getting their hands on a genuine vanilla face. So basically that leaves background checks for foreigners when getting their visas like South Korea started shortly after its 2007 incident. And if there’s one thing I love, it’s another layer of bureaucracy when trying to get something done in China.

So Dr. Lowe, that’s why you’re one of the foreigners who ruin it for the rest of us.

The Slackers – Microcosms Part 4

Posted: December 8, 2011 in Uncategorized
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Each day this week I’m posting a different story from the university I taught at in China; which I often felt was a kind of microcosm of the country as a whole. It’s hard to say to what extent the communist system has shaped Chinese culture from the top-down and what pre-existing Chinese values lent to the rise of authoritarianism from the bottom. I feel these stories each demonstrate a trend in Chinese culture that can be felt at many different levels. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether it’s politics, imbedded values or something else that enabled these stories.

Part 4: The Slackers

It’s easy to be impressed by Chinese students when you first come to China. The amount of dedication some of them put into their studies at the expense of their social life, and even health, has a way of putting you to shame. But then there are people like Jackson who make you second-guess a lot of the “hard-working Chinese” stereotypes.

Jackson was one of my undergraduates and it didn’t take me long to wonder just what the hell he was doing majoring in English. I couldn’t understand a word he said and his writing assignments looked like he’d randomly plucked words from the dictionary and splattered them across the page. He was a stark contrast to every other student in the class.

But then the others brought me up to speed. Jackson’s father was a famous rocket professor at the university and his mother was the finance president of the school hospital. And by astonishing coincidence, Jackson had been admitted to the university in spite of his dismal entrance exam performance.

But the astonishing coincidences didn’t stop with his admission. When all the students had to pass a listening comprehension test to move on to their junior year, Jackson was conspicuously absent – yet still ended up with a passing score. When it came time to write his final thesis, a teacher was dispatched to complete it for him. And he was never bothered to defend it like the other students. Upon graduation he went to get his Master’s degree in an English program in Sweden. How he managed that and how he fared when he arrived, I can only imagine.

All of Jackson’s classmates knew he was a special case and generally accepted it as a fact of life. But that’s not to say they couldn’t buy some of the opportunities he had. During their senior year everyone took the TEM-8, a certification test for English majors that’s usually needed to get a teaching job, and generally very helpful for other careers.

When the scores came out, several failed while some of the worst students had gotten the highest scores. A friend told me that they’d each bought the answer key beforehand for 3,000 yuan ($470) – a sum of money far out of reach for most.

I remembered a few months earlier when a graduate student was straddling his 6th story window threating to jump. His professor was holding his degree ransom – refusing to let him graduate until he did more research and completed a paper in the professor’s name. The student felt the threat of suicide was the only way to get the attention needed to get his rightful diploma.

So I was furious when weighing this against what my cheating students had done – ensuring that when recruiters came the following month they’d take the jobs away from the more qualified (albeit less affluent and dishonest) people. On my Renren (Chinese Facebook) account, I was friends with most of  those I taught. I wrote a status update saying, “It seems many students cheated on their TEM-8. It also seems the university doesn’t plan to do anything about it. Disgraceful.”

The comment caused a sensation in the dorms. Apparently I had broken a taboo that everyone knew about, but wouldn’t dare mention in such a public forum. Later that night I got an email from one of my students:

“Thank you for your support for those students who have failed the TEM-8 because of others cheating. In fact, I am so miserable that there are only 2 scores I need to get the certificate. But many students like me can do nothing but to accept the reality and blame ourselves for the fate…”

The following year those who failed were allowed to take the test one more time. I later found out that that girl, and most others, saved up and bought the answers the second time around.

The Inspection – Microcosms Part 3

Posted: December 7, 2011 in Uncategorized
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Each day this week I’m posting a different story from the university I taught at in China; which I often felt was a kind of microcosm of the country as a whole. It’s hard to say to what extent the communist system has shaped Chinese culture from the top-down and what pre-existing Chinese values lent to the rise of authoritarianism from the bottom. I feel these stories each demonstrate a trend in Chinese culture that can be felt at many different levels. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether it’s politics, imbedded values or something else that enabled these stories.

Part 3: The Inspection

As soon as I arrived at the university in August I noticed the construction. Pretty typical in China, but this had a sense of urgency to it. Buildings were getting facelifts and an elaborate obstacle course was being built in the center of campus for exercise. One of the Chinese teachers told me that each university undergoes an inspection every five years to keep its accreditation and decide its national ranking. Our university would be having its inspection in November and things would be “busy” until then.

“That seems kind of stupid,” I said to the teacher. “They warn the school this far in advance about the inspection?”

“Yes,” she said. “It is quite stupid.”

As she predicted, the impending inspection made campus “busy” in that it was completely non-conducive to teaching and living. Drilling and jackhammers constantly interrupted class. In the week before the inspection the teachers were all told we needed to have all our lesson plans for the whole semester written out and kept with us in case inspectors asked for it.

All the students were given staggered schedules of when they would be required to study in the library – giving the impression of dedicated learning. I escaped the brunt of the new rules as a foreign teacher presumably safe from the non-English speaking inspectors. But everyone else was visibly stressed out from the work and instructions being hammered into them.

Finally the big week arrived. I went to pick up my pay at the foreign affairs office, which doubled as a high-end hotel and reception center for guests. As I rode nearer on my bike I could see water spraying three stories high from down the street. Unbeknownst to me the little pond in front was capable of putting on an impressive fountain show. As I got closer I saw several men in suits and pretty girls in traditional qipao dresses lined up at the entrance. As I pulled up, a guard hustled me to park my bike around the corner and get inside. I entered the building just as the black Audis rolled up.

The next morning I saw other impressive fountains around the school that had never been turned on. In my teaching building people were using the elevators, which everyone had previously assumed were broken. When I went to lunch at the cafeteria the food was wonderful and came in portions much larger than usual. Then that evening I walked by a forest in the middle of campus where students go to make out because of the complete darkness. But that night it was fully illuminated by colorful lights I had never realized existed. If the inspectors had actually walked inconspicuously amongst the students they would have clearly noticed something was up from everyone pointing in awe at all the new pretty things.

But it’s unlikely the inspectors ever got that chance. From what I heard, it was one banquet after another with the actual inspection happening in a suited entourage that could be seen coming a mile away.

Someone from a nearby university told me that when they underwent their check, the inspectors were all given expensive laptops to help them do their work – which they were welcome to keep afterwards. I don’t know whether anything like that happened during our inspection. I asked a Chinese friend at the school if he thought they were getting bribes and he looked at me like I was stupid. “Of course,” he said half-jokingly. “That’s why I hope to have that job some day.”

For the rest of the week the campus felt like someone had died. Students and teachers walked from point A to point B trying to follow their scripts. As soon as the inspectors left, the school breathed a collective sigh of relief. The fountains and elevators were turned off and the amorous young couples got their privacy back in hookup forest. I met one of my Chinese teacher friends who’d spent some time abroad. She gave me a big smile and exclaimed, “We’re free!”

“What was the point of that?” I asked. “Doesn’t everyone realize what a farce the whole thing is?”

“We know,” she said laughing, fully aware of how absurd it seemed to me. “But we just do it and forget about it. We don’t have to worry about it for five more years now.”

 

Insulting American Visa Process Drives off Talent

Posted: May 3, 2010 in Uncategorized
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Global Times – March 17th, 2010

After waiting outside in nervous anticipation, my girlfriend finally emerged from the building that my eyes had been fixated on for hours. I could tell instantly from the look on her face that the result was what we had hoped for.  I quickly stood up and threw my arms around her and shared a long joyful embrace as a slight tear came to my eye.

The building she had come out of was not a hospital or a testing center, but the American consulate in Shanghai. She had been granted a simple tourist visa to visit my home in the United States. Our exuberance may seem a little excessive…except to those who have gone through the process themselves.

America maintains one of the world’s most complicated, and many would say pretentious, visa application processes. On March 1st, the American embassy and consulates in China began a new online visa application promising make the process easier and faster. However, the new application really only appears to make things significantly easier for those processing the visas, not the applicants themselves.

Applicants for any type of visa still must all go through a number of steps culminating in a trip to their district’s American consulate for a visa interview. For some, this could entail a journey of over 4,000 kilometers. Upon arrival applicants usually must wait in line for hours before they are interviewed by the consular officer who has sole discretion as to whether an applicant is approved.

The American embassy states regarding visa applicants: “Every alien is presumed to be an immigrant until he establishes to the satisfaction of the consular officer, at the time of application for admission, that he is entitled to nonimmigrant status. […] The law places this burden of proof on each individual applicant.”

This euphemistically phrased policy basically says that that all visa applicants are assumed guilty until they prove themselves innocent of visa fraud. Many applicants are treated accordingly under this criminal assumption. During my girlfriend’s interview she was interrogated by the consular officer and had to answer several personal questions about our relationship and her family background.

Then, as a final insult, whether or not applicants are approved for

American Consular Districts

their visa, they still must forfeit their 904 yuan ($132.40) application fee, and of course, all the time and money it cost them to travel to the interview. It’s a common occurrence for an applicant to spend several days and thousands of yuan traveling across the country for the interview, only to be denied their visa without an explanation.

In the past, America could get away with this insulting visa policy. Known as “The land of opportunity” with its top universities and limitless possibilities for self-starting entrepreneurs, it’s a place that used to be one of the few obvious paths to success. But now the world dynamic has changed and, with the rise of the rest, America is no longer the only enticing venue around.

China is a prime indicator of this new dynamic. Local Chinese talent is finding greater and greater incentive to stay home or go to countries other than America. The difficult and degrading visa process is often cited as the final straw in the decisions of Chinese scholars and businessmen to take their talent or investment elsewhere. In addition to the growing talent vacuum, American businesses with ties abroad often complain that the visa restrictions mean their business dealings with overseas partners usually must take place abroad, putting them at a distinct disadvantage in negotiations.

Historically, one of America’s greatest strengths has been that it could attract talented people from around the world to contribute to its great achievements. If America continues its intrusive visa policy into the coming years, it will do so at its great detriment. By giving needless disrespect to those it hopes to attract, America will insure that countless opportunities are lost.

While illegal immigration may be a legitimate concern in America, it’s one that’s diminishing as the relative quality of life and number of opportunities rise elsewhere. It cannot continue to justify the visa policy which is quickly becoming a vestige of a past world order.  If the policy goes unreformed, American consular officers of the near future may find that there aren’t so many people lining up to get in anymore.